cambridge university press the origins of american literature studies an institutional history nov 2007 kho tài liệu bách khoa

Acknowledgments pagexi1 The birth of the Ph.D.: The Johns Hopkins “English,” definitions old and new 15 English in the research university 19 American literature emerges 23 Pushed to the

LITERATURE STUDIES

Although American literature is now a standard subject in the college curriculum, a century ago few people thought it should be taught there Elizabeth Renker uncovers the complex historical process through which American literature overcame its image of aesthetic and historical inferiority to become an important field for academic study and research Renker’s extensive original archival research focuses on four institutions of higher education serving distinct regional, class, race, and gender populations She argues that American literature’s inferior image arose from its affiliation with non-elite schools, teachers, and students, and that it had to overcome this social identity in order to achieve status as serious knowledge Renker’s revisionary analysis is an important contribution to the intellectual history of the United States and will be of interest to anyone studying, teaching, or researching American literature.

e l i z a b e t h r e n k e r isAssociate Professor of English at The Ohio State University.

Wai Chee Dimock, Yale University Albert Gelpi, Stanford University Gordon Hutner, University of Illinois, Urbana–Champaign

Walter Benn Michaels, University of Illinois, Chicago

Kenneth Warren, University of Chicago

Slavery, Philosophy, and American Literature, 1830–1860

THE ORIGINS OF AMERICAN

Cambridge, New York, Melbourne, Madrid, Cape Town, Singapore, São Paulo Cambridge University Press

The Edinburgh Building, Cambridge CB2 8RU, UK

First published in print format

ISBN-13 978-0-521-88345-0

ISBN-13 978-0-511-36661-1

© Elizabeth Renker 2007

2007

Information on this title: www.cambridge.org/9780521883450

This publication is in copyright Subject to statutory exception and to the provision of relevant collective licensing agreements, no reproduction of any part may take place without the written permission of Cambridge University Press.

ISBN-10 0-511-36661-2

ISBN-10 0-521-88345-8

Cambridge University Press has no responsibility for the persistence or accuracy of urls for external or third-party internet websites referred to in this publication, and does not guarantee that any content on such websites is, or will remain, accurate or appropriate.

Published in the United States of America by Cambridge University Press, New York

www.cambridge.org

hardback

eBook (EBL) eBook (EBL) hardback

Gordon McConville HewesWalter Rufus ArnoldAlexander Hayden RenkerAntonia Barron RenkerCharlotte Marie Renker

Future undergraduates

Acknowledgments pagexi

1 The birth of the Ph.D.: The Johns Hopkins

“English,” definitions old and new 15

English in the research university 19

American literature emerges 23

Pushed to the margins 30

Tensions with the secondary schools 32

2 Seminary wars: female teachers and the seminary

Mary Lyon and the seminary model 42

A new national culture of the school 44

Competing models of the adequate teacher 47

American literature, curricular signifier 50

Redefinitions: institution, subject 58

3 Higher education for African Americans:

Early history 65

National ideologies of negro education 69

Competing curricula at Wilberforce 73

American literature emerges: the normal department 76

American literature moves up 79

Hurdles to the “liberal arts” 82

Forward and backward 88

ix

4 Literary value and the land-grant model:

The Morrill Act and the new “liberal education” 97

The Ohio agricultural and mechanical college:

redefining literary value 99

American literature: curricular values in conflict 109

American literature moves down 113

“Confusion in curricula” 116

American literature and the ethos of practicality 120

Student literacy is changing 129

Students are changing their ideas about authorship 134

The participation age has begun 136

Amateurs are becoming the new authorities 140

College and university archivists around the nation generously sharedwith me their knowledge about the primary materials in their care I amparticularly grateful to Patricia Albright of Mount Holyoke College;Jacqueline Brown of the Wilberforce University Archives; Bertha Ihnat ofThe Ohio State University Archives; Gary Lundell of The University

of Washington Archives; Margery Sly of the Smith College Archives;James Stimpert of The Ferdinand Hamburger, Jr Archives of The JohnsHopkins University; and Clifford L Muse, Jr of The Moorland-Spin-garn Research Center at Howard University

The idea for this project was born while I was on my own path tothe Ph.D at The Johns Hopkins University Although working in theDepartment of English, I acquired additional training as an historianfrom Ronald G Walters His seminar in American Social Historyinspired me to begin archival research on the history of the discipline

of English and its institutions, situated within the more general matrix ofprofessionalism and education in the United States

The work of Nina Baym, Gerald Graff, and Paul Lauter in particularinspired this project and their interest and support helped to sustain it.Daniel Aaron, Robert Heilman, R.W.B Lewis, and Julian Markels, whoparticipated at various points in the history I trace, graciously allowed me

to interview them Graduates and former faculty of the institutions

I studied, as well as faculty spouses and faculty children, correspondedwith me and answered my questions James Phelan and Frank Donoghueread seemingly innumerable drafts and somehow maintained their sta-mina for reading even more drafts Paula Bernat Bennett, Saul Cornell,Jared Gardner, Stephen G Hall, Aman Garcha, and Janice Radway readand discussed parts of the manuscript and gave invaluable direction andadvice Nan Johnson shared her own work on curricular history Harvey

J Graff’s perspective pushed me past the hurdles William J Reeseclarified the history of high schools Mike Rose’s tactical advice enabled

xi

me to see the big picture Shrewd critiques by the anonymous readers forCambridge University Press improved the final contours of the book.Robert Miklitsch offered balance, ballast, and good humor Andrew Pes-sin’s wise friendship steered me past siren songs My undergraduateresearch assistants, Rebecca Alexander, Rebecca Zell, and Kimberly Ackley,heroically swam through libraries Sharon Cameron, Cathy N Davidson,and Michael Moon brought parts of the manuscript into print during itslong gestation and I am grateful for their enthusiasm.

A shorter version of Chapter 1, “Resistance and Change: The Rise ofAmerican Literature Studies,” appeared in American Literature 64 ( June

1992) Begun out of my instant fascination with Graff’s Professing ture, that article later became the germ of this book “‘American Literature’

Litera-in the College Curriculum: Three Case Studies, 1890– 1910,” whichappeared in ELH 67 (2000), contains brief excerpts from Chapters 2and 3

How does a topic – any topic – become a school subject? And how does agiven subject find its place in the school system? What factors render itappropriate to a particular grade level, kind of school, brand of teacher, ortype of student? The answers to these questions vary from one subject andone era to another Indeed, every subject has its own curricular history.Individual curricular subjects in turn comprise a larger knowledge cate-gory that we typically refer to as “the curriculum.” While, in its mostrudimentary sense, this term designates a school’s regular course of study,the historical phenomenon of the curriculum is not regular but variableand contingent Curricula might or might not vary from school to schoolwithin and across specific time periods The changing historical incar-nations of the curriculum serve as what Richard Hofstadter and

C DeWitt Hardy call “a barometer by which we may measure the tural pressures that operate upon the school.”1

cul-In the pages that follow, Itrace the history of one curricular subject in particular Although stillmost commonly known as “American literature,” that designation is now

on the brink of change.2

In that sense, this book frames both thebeginning and the end of “American literature” in the curriculum.3Although elementary and high school curricula widely offered Americanliterature by the late nineteenth century, colleges and universities typicallyresisted its encroachment on the curriculum until the mid-twentiethcentury Types of resistance varied from total curricular exclusion tovarious forms of strategic marginalization, for example, restrictingAmerican literature to introductory-level survey courses while refusing itspace in advanced undergraduate and graduate classes Howard MumfordJones, who chronicled the academy’s hostility to American literature,dubbed it in 1936 “the orphan child of the curriculum.”4

This bookrecovers and traces the complex historical processes that transformedAmerican literature from a marginalized subject into one deemed worthy

of higher study – that is, from a subject that did not count as serious

advanced knowledge into one that did It is necessary to begin this talebefore the emergence of American literature as such, with two key ele-ments of its prehistory: the massive curricular transformations of the

1870s and the birth of English departments

The classical curriculum that had largely organized study in theantebellum college toppled after 1870, in response to growing culturalpressures best emblematized by three institutions in particular First, thenew Cornell University opened in 1868 as, in benefactor Ezra Cornell’sfamous words, “an institution where any person can find instruction inany study.” Second, President Charles William Eliot became president ofHarvard University in 1869 and inaugurated the elective system there.While Cornell and Harvard differed dramatically in fundamental edu-cational ethos, embodying the distinction between vocational and liberalhigher education, these otherwise competing institutions neverthelessunited in legitimizing the idea of a broader curriculum In so doing, theynot only challenged but also demolished the curricular criteria of thetraditional colleges Third, The Johns Hopkins University opened in

1876, redefining higher education as a form of advanced scientificexpertise wholly independent of collegiate prescriptions Its educationalphilosophy functioned as what Frederick Rudolph aptly calls a “successfulassault on the undergraduate course of study.”5

The curricular transformations of the 1870s also created the specificinstitutional matrix in which American literature would later make its bidfor curricular status: the English Department English, too, was notalways a college subject It emerged and took shape as an area of advancedstudy in the last quarter of the nineteenth century, along with the othermodern languages.6

At this time, the professor of modern languagesbecame a new job category As Michael Warner has shown, these newprofessionals invented literature as a “knowledge subject” that would notonly warrant but require the professional methodologies they developed.7Yet not all forms of literature became knowledge subjects simultaneously.American literature famously lagged far behind English in its installation

as a college subject and field of scholarly expertise When I interviewedDaniel Aaron and R.W.B Lewis, prominent early scholars of Americanliterature, I asked both in what year they thought the field had achievedinstitutional status Aaron said: the 1930s; Lewis: the 1960s.8

The reasonsfor this widely noted lag, a full half century even by Aaron’s more modestestimate, remain a historical puzzle.9

Published histories of the field typically cite the late 1920s as theturning point toward professionalization: the foundation of the American

Literature Group of the Modern Language Association in 1921 wasfollowed by the inauguration of professional journals (The New EnglandQuarterly in 1928 and American Literature in 1929); in addition, a growingbody of published research and an increasing number of dissertations inthe field were under way and accumulating momentum by that time.10While historically significant, these advances were nevertheless merely aninterim stage of historical change Jones’s 1936 “orphan child” labelindicates that marginalization persisted despite apparent progress mea-sured in other ways, a point further attested by the oral histories Irecorded with Aaron and Lewis Even its staunchest advocates still typi-cally described American literature as “parochial,” as historical but notbelletristic in interest, and as inferior in quality to “the work of theworld’s greatest artists.”11

Scholarship thus far has focused primarily on the history of publishedscholarship and on the history of the canon as the historical keys to theprofessional transformations of the 1920s.12

These elements are of courseintimately related, focused as they are on research scholars as well asthe authors and texts they determine to constitute the field’s knowledgebase I add to these important studies a third foundational dimension ofthe field’s history that has remained invisible precisely because it has little

to do with research, authors, or books This missing piece is the socialidentity of American literature in the school system

My largest thesis is that American literature’s entrenched image ofaesthetic and historical inferiority was the product of specific kinds ofsocial inferiority that were attached to the place of American literature

in the school system Its curricular identity was associated with elite kinds of schools, teachers, and students, forms of social inferiority

non-in turn ascribed to the nomnon-inal content of “American literature” as abody of texts The social inferiors at issue were particular teacherand student populations in actual schools, matters I treat in elaboratehistorical detail Various institutions of higher education with differenteducational aims, the different and shifting groups of teachersemployed by these institutions (shifts I conceive both synchronicallyand diachronically), and the disparate student populations they servedall shaped the curricular identity of American literature.13

The socialfunctions associated with American literature as a curricular productwere thus a foundational part of its identity as a product, quite apartfrom the content of its canon.14

To achieve canonicity in the highercurriculum, American literature had to work itself out of this inferiorsocial identity

Like other curricular subjects, American literature thus had (and has) amuch broader social identity than that affiliated primarily with either itscanon or its experts The books and authors one might think of as “really”comprising American literature constitute only a fraction of what it sig-nifies in the sphere of social relations My argument thus significantlyadds to and also in some ways reverses the post-1980 debates about thehistory of the canon, which often focus on either the subversive orconventional content of literary texts as the signifying core of their cul-tural work.15

I establish that American literature’s social functions in theeducational system were foundational to its curricular identity, quiteindependent of the content of its canon

Indeed, the subject called “American literature” has its own history ofcanonicity apart from any particular imagined list of classic books It toonegotiated the transformation from noncanonical to canonical within thecollege curriculum in ways that intersect but are not coterminous with thehistory of the authors and texts construed as canonical at any given time.These are discrete registers of the canonical and must be disentangled

if the historical process of canon-formation is to be fully understood.For ease of reference, I will henceforth call the canonicity of Americanliterature as a subject “curricular canonicity” to distinguish it from thecanonicity of individual authors and texts

One emblematic example of the discontinuity between theseregisters of the canonical would be the reception history of the genteeltradition over the course of the past century As Paul Lauter has traced,the accelerating demotion of the Fireside Poets (Longfellow, Whittier,Bryant, Holmes, and Lowell) and the culture of sentiment after the 1920soccurred alongside the accelerating professionalization of the field.16

Itwould be easy to misconstrue the nature of the causal relationshipsbetween the two phenomena American literature did not achieve itscurricular canonicity because it had finally found an inherently canonicalgroup of authors, such as the newly discovered Herman Melville As JohnGuillory argues, there is no such thing as an intrinsically canonical text.17

In the 1920s, new authors were indeed supplanting old favorites andthe number of canonical authors was shrinking dramatically.18

But thefact that “American literature” has reclaimed the sentimental and thegenteel in the past two decades as a fresh, exploding, rediscovered, and re-evaluated area of scholarship is a historical marker for the fact thattheir expulsion in the 1920s was not a necessary but a contingent phe-nomenon, contingent upon particular social formations.19

In other words,the curricular canonicity of American literature is not predicated on any

particular construction of the content of the field The inherent literaryquality of American literature – or lack of it – is, simply put, beside thehistorical point.

The identity of American literature as a knowledge category during theyears of my study fluctuated, at times dramatically, in response to a broadarray of competing cultural impulses Lauter points out that

differing versions of an American canon contested for visibility and power during the decades prior to the First World War After, an essentially new, academic canon emerged and exerted an increasingly hegemonic force in American culture A more detailed study of the institutions central to canon formation will help clarify these processes 20

The following chapters will delineate such contests and fluctuations asthey related to the specific institutions of the educational system There,American literature moved into the curriculum at one type of school, out

at another, and sometimes in and then out at the same school Theindividual agents involved (including students, teachers, textbook authors,department chairs, university presidents, and so on) did not and could notunderstand, from their vantage, either the full range of signifying opera-tions in which their action and inaction were embedded or their eventualoutcomes Teleological histories of the field treat the emergence ofAmerican literature as if it were the endpoint of a linear process in whichits true literary value was finally discovered.21

But the story of Americanliterature could easily have turned out differently Nothing about change isinevitable; literature does not stand apart from the historical processes thatdetermine value in any given time and place.22

My study follows the case method to recover the actual, local historicalprocesses that are, by definition, lost in studies focused on large-scalenational developments The institutional transitions affecting the status ofAmerican literature did not occur in exactly the same terms at exactly thesame time across the landscape of higher education Rather, Americanliterature entered the curricular canon through a historically contingentprocess of debate that varied from school to school and decade to decade

It emerged as a contested new field by way of a process of erratic gains,losses, and shifts I thus linger on failures and setbacks as much as onprofessional advancements These clashes within the larger domain ofAmerican literature’s history as a form of knowledge reveal cultural stakesextending well beyond the covers of books The tumult of the tale bearsclear, although certainly not simply analogical, relevance to the currentmoment in higher education, in which we still uneasily attempt toadjudicate the value and place of “new” fields

In keeping with the particularity of my local method, I work with anentirely different archive than many histories of the field I do not focus

on the secondary archive of published research about American literature

by its early scholars Instead, I center my analysis in the primary archive

of bureaucracy: course catalogues, hiring records, administrative bulletins,presidents’ reports, minutes of department meetings, curriculum develop-ment materials, and so on Here, I agree with Lauter, W.B Carnochan,and David R Shumway that the vast archive of institutional records iscrucial to understanding the genealogy of the curriculum we haveinherited.23

Universities are not Platonic ivory towers preserving andteaching timeless ideas: they are material settings through which ideas aretransmitted, understood, and afforded social function.24

Carnochanpoints out that transhistorical myths about the curriculum have impededour understanding of the actual history of universities, with the result thatthe repetitive crisis-mongering about the curriculum is often an “airless”debate unaware of its own genealogy.25

I place my case studies within the larger social history of professionalexpertise, one of the most dramatic social developments of the post-CivilWar period.26

A rampant spirit of specialization suffused everything fromspectator sports (which began to organize itself in professional teams andleagues) to leisure activities (bicyclists, for example, could subscribe tomore than half a dozen specialized journals on cycling) to the organiza-tion of work life (in which people increasingly identified themselves bytheir occupations or professions) A flurry of professional organizationsreoriented the relation not only between individuals and their work butalso between the general populace and the now-credentialized expertswhose professional assistance they sought The formation of organizationssuch as the American Ophthalmological Society (1864), the AmericanChemical Society (1876), the American Bar Association (1878), theAmerican Surgical Association (1880), the American Forestry Association(1882), the American Institute of Electrical Engineers (1885), the AmericanPediatric Society (1888), and the National Statistical Association (1888)became a reflex of the era.27

The university was an integral part of this knowledge system, and itwas within the broader context of specialization that the American Ph.D.was born to certify the new profession of scholar–professor Prior to thefounding of Johns Hopkins, the small number of Americans in search ofdoctorates had typically gone to Germany.28

Hopkins invented thephenomenon of the American Ph.D., thereby utterly transforming thedoctorate in the United States For the first time, the Ph.D became a

degree with both a social meaning and a professional function TheHopkins model rapidly spread nationwide and, through its influence, thePh.D increasingly became a required credential for college and universityteaching As this new Ph.D model with its foundational notion ofscholarly expertise came to dominate American higher education after

1876, the lives of students and teachers, well beyond the particulars ofgraduate programs, also changed dramatically For example, it was notuntil the 1890s that college study was systematically organized into subjectareas called “departments,” which is now so standard as to seem inevi-table This specialized conception of knowledge developed in tandemwith the emergent job class of the knowledge expert

I treat four institutions of higher education, which I present as roughlyemblematic of disparate educational models: Hopkins, which representedthe revolutionary ascent of the research model; Mount Holyoke College(which opened as Mount Holyoke Female Seminary in 1837), emblematic

of the old-style female seminary; Wilberforce University (which opened

as The Ohio African University in 1856), whose institutional contours had

to respond, however uneasily, to competing models of “Negro” tion; and The Ohio State University (which opened as The OhioAgricultural and Mechanical College in 1873), founded on and com-mitted to the land-grant model of education for the “industrial classes,” asdirected by the Morrill Act of 1862.29

educa-These institutions varied in cational aim, region, faculty composition, and student body Theymanaged, often struggled, to serve their own local needs alongsideexternal pressures exerted by national developments in higher educationand American culture more broadly

edu-Since the eventual emergence of American literature at any givenschool was antedated by years, sometimes decades, of institutional phe-nomena that shaped when and how it later arose, each chapter begins byassessing developments that preceded the appearance of American lit-erature per se These phenomena were nevertheless integral to laterdevelopments and should be understood as such Thus each chapter tracesthe founding ideology and early history of the institution in question,examining the nature of the faculty and student body and the school’seducational goals Since American literature was typically housed inEnglish Departments, I also attend to the founding conceptions ofEnglish that would later shape the kind of space afforded to Americanliterature When I turn to the ways in which American literature began tocarve out a curricular place within these local institutional conditions, Ifocus on particular curricular turning points, especially the point at which

American literature achieved curricular stability in the English ment What that stability meant, as well as when and how it occurred,varied from one institution to another; consequently, not all chapterscover an identical time period in the same way or at the same length.

Depart-I stress rather than elide local distinctions Depart-Indeed, Depart-I argue that ferences from one case to another are essential to understanding thecompeting conceptions of value at work in this historical process AsMary Poovey argues in her history of New York University, scrupulousattention to local conditions acts as a corrective to large general claimsabout how universities and curricula actually operate Laurence R Veyseytoo, in his magisterial history of American universities, notes that broadschema are of only limited usefulness, since most actual institutionsdiverge from large-scale generalizations 30

dif-My local archives foregroundthe ragged edges that have been trimmed, hence lost, from other accounts

of the history of the field, rendering visible the marginal, disparate, andlosing forces that the large-scale narrative has expunged.31

Chapter 1 focuses on the birth of the American Ph.D degree at TheJohns Hopkins University and on the vast institutional repercussions ofthis development Hopkins reinvented American higher education as theprovince of professional scholar–experts It also forcefully promulgated

“English” as a new professional field that was the domain of expert

“scientists.” The ideology of English as a knowledge subject at Hopkinsdefined American literature there as inferior: I show in programmatic andcurricular detail how the new Hopkins ideology of “research” definedAmerican literature as inappropriate to the rhetorically and practicallymasculine world of the professional research scholar Far from being amerely theoretical objection, this ideology generated specific curricularand programmatic decisions that marginalized American literature classes,relegating them to the university’s most female division, the College forTeachers

In the institutional turbulence of the late nineteenth century in whichthe Johns Hopkins model was ascendant, other longer standing educa-tional models met their demise One of these was the female seminary, acommon nineteenth-century form of the school Chapter 2traces MountHolyoke Female Seminary’s institutional history in the avant-garde offemale education, as well as its historically early American literaturecurriculum I then show how this old-style seminary redefined itself asMount Holyoke College in 1893 in response to new external pressuresgenerated by the changing climate of American higher education Part

of this redefinition included expunging American literature from the

curriculum American literature’s associations with lower schools and thewomen who taught in them marked the field as anti-professional in thenew university culture of the Ph.D.

Chapter 3turns to Wilberforce University, one of the first institutionsfounded for the higher education of “Negroes.” I show how ideologies ofeducation for African-Americans in the postbellum period illuminate theplace of American literature at Wilberforce, where it entered the curri-culum by way of the normal school rather than in the “College Division,”which was committed to liberal arts training One of the few professionsopen to educated African Americans was that of teaching black students.American literature functioned as an appropriate subject for AfricanAmericans because it would suit their social and occupational limits.Subjects defined as “liberal arts,” on the other hand, functioned ideolo-gically during this period as “equal” to white education To these whitesubjects African-American students had restricted access The installation

of American literature at Wilberforce enacted social programs meant tolimit curricula, jobs, and status for black people

Chapter 4considers the radical innovation of the land-grant movementand its ethos of practical education Turning to the case of The OhioState University, I explore how the ideology of practicality affected theliberal arts in general, as well as English and American literature inparticular I trace the early, inherent suspicions toward the liberal arts inthe land-grant movement because of their cultural elitism At Ohio, thecurricular status of American literature underwent a steady process ofdowngrading in the English Department after its emergence in 1890;nevertheless, the consolidating ethos of the English profession that gra-dually devalued American literature at this time eventually came intostark conflict with the extramural forces of nationalism during WorldWar II American literature would finally receive an enthusiastic curri-cular embrace at Ohio State at this time Ironically, because of thepractical services it could render in the cause of nationalism, it evenoutpaced the status of the field of English that had consistently mar-ginalized it This case presents a powerful example of the competing andchaotic pressures that often drive institutional change – pressures thatinstitutional rhetoric neither understands nor acknowledges

I have chosen not to write studies of the schools often construed asAmerican literature’s most significant institutional pioneers, such as DukeUniversity, the University of Pennsylvania, and Columbia University Mypremise in fact contests the assumption that those are the stories thatmost require telling The intellectual point cannot be overstated that, by

definition, every college and university in the United States that was inoperation during the period in question engaged the macro-level socialand institutional formations that are my subject In that sense, this bookcould be expanded thousands-fold and each new case would aid ourfuller comprehension, whether the school in question is Duke Universityand its founding of the flagship journal in the field or the impoverishedWilberforce University teaching American literature to post-emancipa-tion blacks Two of my four case studies focus on institutions of highereducation for African Americans and women, schools that were not, inthe terms of their day, elite institutions establishing the major graduateprograms and journals or hiring the most prestigious scholars These aremarginal and as-yet untold stories of the field’s history that add sub-stantially to what we know about American literature’s diverse social andinstitutional functions Schools where American literature pedagogyfunctioned to train students with socially circumscribed opportunitiesare as important to our understanding of the social functions of thecurriculum as the history of Ph.D programs placing their graduates onthe most influential faculties Even schools that did not teach Americanliterature in any substantial way are as important to a full under-standing of the cultural phenomenon of American literature in thehigher curriculum as those that taught it aggressively As I show in thecase of Johns Hopkins, for example, the omission of the subject fromthe curriculum there was as motivated and significant as its inclusionelsewhere.

Just as I have not focused on the institutions typically thought of asleaders in American literature studies, I have also not focused on themajor secondary studies or the leading scholars around whom a knowl-edge community began to converge, especially after 1920 While suchsubjects come up in passing where instrumental, they are not my focus

As I noted earlier, these topics have been the nearly exclusive focus ofwork on the history of the field because of the linked phenomena ofprofessionalization and published scholarship, and have already been ablycovered at length by others.32

By the time of the professional turningpoint in the late 1920s, American literature had already had decades ofinstitutional life that existing studies have not yet assessed The fact thatits institutional life was mostly on the outskirts of English departmentswho kept it there does not alter the fact that this was a form of institu-tional life nonetheless Failures, setbacks, false starts, progress followed byregress, and irregularities from one institution to another across thelandscape of higher education are characteristic of American literature’s

fortunes roughly until World War II My detailed focus on the pre-1920period recovers this mostly unknown prehistory.

My archival research stops at 1950 for two reasons First, at that pointAmerican literature definitively entered the higher curriculum in the wake

of World War II I use the term “definitive” not to mean that its history

as a field would no longer change; I mean merely that, from this pointuntil the present moment, American literature would have a regular,standard place in English department curricula.33

Second, higher tion was about to begin a dramatic new phase, one whose structuraltransformations would require another book entirely.34

educa-Seen in its largest frame, the story my book tells is one in which a halfcentury of uncertainty about the identity of American literature as asubject (from roughly 1880 to 1930) was followed by a half century ofstability (from roughly 1930 to 1980) that came to an end with theinauguration of the canon wars Twenty-five years later, the discipline isleft searching for a pragmatic core of disciplinary stability My conclu-sion, “The End of the Curriculum,” argues that we have reached a newturning point in the social history of American literature as a curricularsignifier, a turning point that the field’s current debates chronicallymisperceive The top-down conceptions of the field that drive whatDonald E Pease calls “the field-Imaginary” will, I argue, cede their pri-macy to a new and urgent surge of bottom-up pressures arising from thechanging nature of the undergraduate population.35

One of the archivallessons of my book is that forms of literature do not achieve curricularlegitimation because their canon is great nor because great scholars writegreat books about them Books, scholars, and universities do not con-stitute knowledge solely on their own terms External pressures are potentand constitutive forces The University of Texas announced in 2005 that

it is eliminating books from its undergraduate library, certainly a binger of broader trends What has been called the new “participationage” of collective intellectual power, emblematized by Google, citizenjournalism, and user-generated content, will meet the essential con-servatism of the university and its top-down models of curricularknowledge (including but not limited to American literature) and pushboth into a new era of transformation akin to the upheaval that began inthe 1870s Indeed, I contend that we are on the verge of what I call thepost-curricular university: the third most significant change in the history

har-of higher education in the United States

While the argument of my first four chapters derives from thehistorical archive, the conclusion instead analyzes debates currently in

progress, typically recorded by the media, at the time the book went topress The orientation of the conclusion, both in nature and in style, thusdiffers substantially from that of the preceding chapters The currenttrends I trace simply have a different relation to the historical archive than

do my pre-1950 materials The form of the conclusion, which moves fromthe past to the present in topic and from archival to journalistic in style,intentionally enacts this difference

Curricular change emerges from a dialectical stew of intramural andexternal forces, top-down and bottom-up pressures, debate, planning,intention, inertia, guesswork, and chaos It does not proceed via intelli-gent design I do not mean that colleges and educators do not struggle in

a serious, well-intentioned way to plan curriculum that will benefit thebest interests of students; indeed, they do so on a regular basis in greatearnest My point is that such plans themselves emerge from, and thenchange again in response to, historical forces that exceed any particularversion of a “best” curriculum The college curriculum undergoes acontinuous process of evolution and indeed must do so if college as asocial phenomenon is to retain its centrality to American life Stability,while reassuring, is simply not the lifeblood of the curriculum, regardless

of the crisis mentality that invariably greets any major new change Theclassical curriculum reigned and died; the elective system redefined whatcounts as knowledge; coeducation and public universities turned collegefrom a sphere for social elites into a popular phenomenon; and WorldWar II structurally transformed universities again, this time around newgovernment and industrial protocols for sponsoring and funding research

We have reached another transformative historical point at which we facethe end of the curriculum altogether To face its end wisely, we mustunderstand its beginning

The birth of the Ph.D.: The Johns

Hopkins research model

In 1876, The Johns Hopkins University invented the Ph.D degree that weknow today Both Yale and Harvard had previously awarded doctorates, butthey had done so in scant numbers, without programmatic initiative ordirection.1

By 1873, Yale had awarded 90 percent of American Ph.D.s, with

an anemic total of twenty-three The M.A degree had been more common,but it, too, was an aimless degree awarded without systematic training

or clear social purpose A quip current at Harvard through 1869 reportedthat you could get the M.A there for “keeping out of jail five years andpaying five dollars.”2

Simply put, graduate school in the United Stateshad no social meaning Hopkins transformed the pursuit of an advanceddegree from an arcane and marginal academic exercise into a necessary andcompetitive credential for a new profession: the scholar-expert The Ph.D.scholar-expert became the Hopkins brand Inspired by the nineteenth-century German conception of pure research, the Hopkins doctoratecertified the Ph.D.’s rigorous training, his ability to pursue original inves-tigation, and his capacity to reproduce his professional skills in subsequentgenerations of advanced students Within fifteen years of Hopkins’ incep-tion, its Ph.D model had thoroughly saturated and altered the landscape ofAmerican higher education, indeed becoming so hegemonic that its revo-lutionary freshness in the 1870s is now hard to imagine

Every institution of higher education in the nation had to contend withthe Hopkins Ph.D as a new social force Abraham Flexner, a Hopkinsgraduate of 1886 and an influential analyst of higher education, noted that

“research was not recognized in America as one of the dominant concerns ofhigher education until the flag was nailed to the mast on the opening ofJohns Hopkins University in 1876.”3

From a more contemporary historicalvantage, Edward Shils has concluded, “The establishment of JohnsHopkins was perhaps the single, most decisive event in the history of

learning in the Western hemisphere.”4

According to Harvard’s PresidentEliot, Harvard’s graduate school

started feebly in 1870 and 1871, [and] did not thrive until the example of Johns Hopkins forced our faculty to put their strength into the development of our instruction for graduates And what was true of Harvard was true of every other university in the land which aspired to create an advanced school of arts and sciences 5

The influence of the Hopkins model was particularly notable by the turn

of the century In 1871, national graduate enrollment stood at 198; by 1890that figure had risen to 2,382; and by 1910, by which point the Ph.D hadbecome a required credential for many faculty positions, it was 9,370.6From 1876 to 1900, Hopkins surpassed all other institutions in thenumber of doctorates it granted, with only Harvard a close second.7Hopkins disseminated its research model throughout American highereducation not only by example but also by literally staffing America’scolleges and universities with its graduates through the first quarter of thetwentieth century.8

In 1926, one thousand of Hopkins’ fourteen hundreddoctoral graduates up to that date staffed college and university faculties.9For instructors around the country, the arrival of the school’s firstHopkins Ph.D as a colleague was often an event of either messianic orcatastrophic proportions

Hopkins’ success in promulgating the new professional model ofthe scholar-expert made cultural sense in an era obsessed with specializa-tion and professionalism The birth of “professionalism” as a culture, touse Burton J Bledstein’s apt formulation, was in turn related to otherlarge-scale postbellum redefinitions of occupation The urgent socialconflicts between the emergent forms of monopoly capitalism and itslaborers are the era’s best-known manifestations of social unrest related toshifts in the nature of labor For industrial strikes, the peak years were 1877,

1886, and 1892–93, the same era in which the Ph.D carved out its newsocial role in the hierarchy of American work.10

As social historians havepointed out, this was a time of rampant professional self-definition,emblematized by the formation of professional societies, licensing laws,and credentialing organizations.11

Hopkins’ inauguration of the Ph.D asthe credentialing mechanism for the scholar-expert was part of this broadernational shift toward professionalism in an era that was redefining work indramatic ways.12

As Hopkins reinvented American higher education, it also reinvented

“English” as a new professional field The newly ascendant ideology ofEnglish at Hopkins simultaneously marginalized American literature as

inferior: not rigorous enough to be suited to the scientific training Hopkinsprovided and not suited to the emergent profession of the English expert.Far from being a merely theoretical objection, this ideology generatedspecific curricular and programmatic decisions that institutionalizedAmerican literature classes there as an inferior knowledge product.American literature was kept out of the scholarly classes for serious studentsand housed instead in the university’s most female branch, which trainednot scholar-experts but lower-level teachers: a population marked by bothprofessional status and sex as inferior to the real scientists in English.Nationwide, American literature’s institutional venues at this time werepredominantly lower-level and otherwise non-elite schools The emergentprofession of English metonymically ascribed the social connotations ofinferiority attached to these institutions, teachers, and students to thesubject of American literature itself That is to say, American literature’sreputation as a curricular subject inferior in content and inherent value was

a function of its place in the school system – not the reverse

Although programmatic decisions at Hopkins strenuously marginalizedAmerican literature, this intramural definition was to come under intenseexternal pressures as a result of the two world wars Intramural behaviorsare never completely self-determined or self-contained, and indeed thenationalist surge generated by the Great War gave American literature aforceful push into the curriculum at all levels, against the resistance ofschools such as Hopkins The additional nationalist impetus provided byWorld War II compounded these early gains At this point, the broaderuncertainty at the national level about whether American literature was tobecome a knowledge subject was in part resolved.13

Hopkins’ intramuraldefinition of American literature lost in this wider contest, and Americanliterature moved into the higher curriculum there I stress the word “lost”here: American literature moved into the higher curriculum at Hopkinsnot because its English Department finally saw the curricular light, gave upthe error of its ways, and embraced the true inherent value of Americanliterature but because it lost a national curricular debate whose terms hadnever been clear to begin with The outcome could easily have been dif-ferent, but the historical accident of World War II decided the debateagainst the Hopkins position

“english,” definitions old and new

To understand the eventual emergence of American literature at Hopkins,

we must understand the ideology of English, which itself arose out of

contest English had fought to overcome a lower-school, anti-scholarlycurricular past to redefine itself as a serious, professional subject fit forexperts As scholars have noted, philology as a professional method wasthe historical key to effecting this transition.14

We must clarify what the term “English” meant at this historicalmoment, which differs from its meaning today.15

Nineteenth-centuryforms of school consisted of a bewildering array of union graded schools,town schools, free schools, district schools, academies, grammar schools,and so on.16

Amidst this proliferation of terms, a basic categorical tinction obtained between “English schools” and “classical schools.”Sometimes these were distinct institutions; sometimes a single schooloffered both English and “classical” curricula and students chose onetrack or the other The word English simply denoted curricula that werenot classical.17

dis-The classical curriculum centered in Latin and Greek buttypically also included subjects such as logic, rhetoric, natural philosophy(later to become physics), and mathematics The English curriculumincluded what were called “modern subjects”: usually a “modern” (asopposed to classical) foreign language, especially French, German, orSpanish; mathematics; sciences, such as natural philosophy, physiology,chemistry, botany, geology, and zoology; history (American, English, and

“modern,” rather than ancient); geography; moral philosophy; an array ofsubjects conceived to be “practical,” such as mensuration and astronomy;and the individual subject that was itself called English, which at this timeincluded grammar, orthography, etymology, syntax, prosody, reading,literature, rhetoric, and occasional classes in elocution All these subjectswere parts of curricular “English.”18

The concept of English thus had at least two identities, which lapped but were not equivalent As a kind of curriculum, English denotednew, practical, and modern subjects in general (but note that it stillshared some subjects, such as mathematics, rhetoric, and natural philo-sophy, with the classical curriculum) As an individual subject, it denotedstudies concerned with reading, speaking, and writing in the Englishlanguage It also denoted a nation, for example, in the teaching of

over-“English” history or literature from England Teachers and students didnot explore the different valences of the term, which sustained and indeedfed the extent to which they could and did function as slippery synonyms.The multivalence of English as a curricular term created a semantic fog inwhich English would claim, and have ascribed to it, an array of identitiesand purposes about which there was no particular consensus, discursiveself-awareness, or even basic comprehension This curricular confusion

had profound and lasting implications; for example, the nationalistconnotations of the word reinforced a postcolonial mentality in theAmerican curriculum.19

The clearest curricular identity of English innineteenth-century America was that of a kind of education that was new,modern, and anti-classical

What did it mean that English was a new kind of curriculum? Some ofits subjects differed, as we have seen, from the classical, and in generalthey changed focus from the ancient to the modern world But beyondtheir contents, these curricula differed most substantially in their socialfunctions, which served to distinguish one population from another TheEnglish curriculum was explicitly targeted to the student population thatwas not college bound, while the classical curriculum served collegepreparatory students Colleges at this time still taught the classical cur-riculum, and required a college preparatory course for admission Incontrast, the kinds of schools teaching the English curriculum were thenon-classical academies (which taught at the elementary or secondarylevels) and the public high schools, which were not college preparatoryinstitutions.20

For all these reasons, both educators and students understood the socialfunction of the English curriculum to be distinctly non-scholarly Edu-cators who propounded the English curriculum and the parents whosupported it defended it, often passionately, in class terms Instead ofserving the world of the American college with its aristocratic focus on thelearned professions, they argued, the English curriculum served personaladvancement in the real challenges of a changing social order Boys fromEnglish schools would enter the world of work, often as clerks andbookkeepers, rather than going on to college and the educated professions

of law, medicine, and ministry They could apply their useful subjects,such as penmanship and accounting, immediately in the marketplace.Girls, who were excluded from colleges anyway, could use their usefulEnglish training as wives and mothers or teachers of young children.William J Reese notes that the debates about schooling in this era arereplete with admiration for the English branches as suited to “practical”pursuits.21

From its social position in these lower-level, non-classical schools,English carved out a bottom-up path that challenged and eventuallyovertook the classical curriculum When the transformation of Americanhigher education began in the 1870s, colleges remained the last classicalholdouts Students who wanted access to an elite college thus still neededclassical training But the popular force of curricular change that had

begun in non-elite lower schools was finally too strong By 1886, PresidentEliot “figured out how to let someone into Harvard College withoutGreek and still keep the hurdles equally high,” as Frederick Rudolphnicely puts it Harvard began to accept advanced mathematics and physics

as substitutes for Greek While colleges would continue to debate themerits of the classical curriculum (orthodox Yale finally gave up its Greekrequirement in 1903), Eliot’s innovation at Harvard really signaled theend of the battle.22

Since the ultimate demise of the classical curriculumoverall had begun with the English curriculum at the lower levels ofschooling, the curricular identity of English came to signify not onlythat which was anti-scholarly, practical, and anti-aristocratic but also thatwhich catered to popular demand and suited lower-level education.Whether or not those were positive attributes depended on who wasassessing the matter.23

These already complex connotations of English became increasinglygendered as the nineteenth century progressed The market for the collegepreparatory schools, as well as for the classical colleges themselves, wasexclusively male English schools not only drew a different stratum ofmale students but also provided education for the untapped demographic

of female students.24

As the century progressed, the female schoolpopulation up through the secondary level increasingly outstripped themale Educators noted by mid-century that girls attended and graduatedfrom high school more frequently than boys, in addition to winning most

of the academic prizes In the post-Civil War period, girls constituted farmore than half of the high school population Educators nationwideobserved and struggled to analyze the phenomenon of female dominance

in the secondary schools, developing rationales, for example, for why boysdid not attend as frequently or perform as well, a subject of debate stillhot.25

The foggy multivalence of English that had long obtained nowincreasingly carried gender among its grab-bag of connotations Thusseveral concurrent trends – the growth of secondary education, its center

in the English branches as explicitly and polemically opposed to theclassical branches, and its widely noted dominance by female students –became bound up with one another, feeding the idea that English was forgirls

The nineteenth-century English curriculum was thus embedded inmajor transitions in American education: from classical to non-classicalcurricula; from college preparatory to practical training; from schools for

a small group of young men entering the learned professions to trainingfor “real life”; from elite student populations to broader populations in

both sex and class terms (less so in racial terms, as African Americans werelargely denied even public education26

); and from a male-dominated to afemale-dominated form of the school The semantic multivalence ofEnglish resonated with its connection to all these social changes Amongits many transformative social functions, the new research universityculture at Hopkins would successfully carve out an alternative identity forEnglish

e n g l i s h i n t h e r e s e a r c h u n i v e r s i t y

The new English professionals struggled to overcome the complexlyinferior connotations of their field Although the long demise of theclassical curriculum was already in progress at lower levels of the school,proponents of the classical curriculum that still controlled higher edu-cation fiercely defended this territory Warner has noted that the rise ofthe research university fostered an institutional struggle for “control of theliterary” that pitted older belletristic venues such as literary magazines,large commercial publishing houses, and the lecture circuit against thenew university departments taking literature as an area of professionalexpertise Lauter has trenchantly stressed the importance of venue tocontrol of the literary.27

To such foci on institutions outside the world ofeducation that competed with university departments, we must add aformative struggle within education: between the lower and higher levels

of the school

In 1884, Th W Hunt, a professor of “Rhetoric and of the EnglishLanguage” at the College of New Jersey (later Princeton University),complained about the place of “decided inferiority” that English occupied

in the collegiate system, of the “persistent opposition” to it from “thosewho are identified with the departments of philosophy and the ancientlanguages and who are thereby presumed to have a just appreciation of allthat pertains to the humanities,” and of the “patronizing and cynical”attitudes of this “classical brotherhood.” Those who opposed Englishcharged that, as the vernacular language, it was insubstantial, did not offerenough difficulty to foster mental discipline, and did not lend itself to thepractice of examination at the core of university study.28

AlthoughEnglish was defeating classics at lower levels of the school, its upwardpenetration of the university curriculum required different measures Itneeded to dispel the widespread perception that it lacked the disciplinaryrigor of the classics and was therefore unsuited to higher education.Hunt’s charges significantly appeared in the first issue of Transactions of

the Modern Language Association of America and served as a battle-cry forthe new English professionals.

The primary method that enabled the upward transition in level andprestige was philology From its inception in Germany, philology hadbeen predicated upon the idea of scientific method Its focus on historicallinguistics, as Allen J Frantzen has shown, “lent a powerful aura ofcertitude to language study and textual criticism” and demonstrated howthese activities could be elevated to the level of the sciences.29

Bledsteindemonstrates that science functioned as a powerful source of professionalauthority in this era A vast array of enterprises promoted themselves assciences to validate their claim to social power, whether or not there wasanything verifiably “scientific” about their actual work.30

The term ence” also stood for a set of cultural values that distinguished the newhigher education from the old.31

“sci-If you were on the side of modernizinghigher education, “science” became part of your rhetorical platform,regardless of what the subject or school in question might be Baymexplains that the number of scientists nationwide began to increase dra-matically around 1880, and by the century’s end “a range of tightlydemarcated (albeit provisional) scientific fields requiring expensive andcontinually updated equipment had been firmly installed in academicinstitutions.” By late century, professional scientists had been clearlydistinguished from amateurs, a distinction that had not obtained duringthe antebellum period.32

In this climate, the philologist emerged as thescientist of English who would carve out a space of professional authority

in the new university culture

The philological transformation of English into a knowledge subjectsuited both the postbellum professional agenda more generally and thescience-based agenda of the emergent research university According toVeysey, 1880 was the watershed point at which the idea of scientificresearch fundamentally altered American higher education; this was alsothe point at which English began to make significant gains in the newuniversity.33

“Scientific research” as a general ideology in higher educationand as a particular ideology in English thus proceeded as concurrenttrends Of course, as Gerald Graff has stressed, philology was not the onlyapproach practiced in English departments, but its role in professiona-lizing the field was foundational When Kemp Malone, Professor ofEnglish Philology at Hopkins, wrote in 1926, “The essence of philology isthe application of scientific method to the study of literature,” he sum-med up the ideology of English that had, for the preceding half century,provided the field’s professional rationale.34

Here again we must consider the increasingly feminized image ofEnglish at the secondary level as it clashed with the university culture ofexpertise As Baym points out, in nineteenth-century America “theauthority of science was male.”35

Her history of the nineteenth-centurysciences demonstrates that both men and women believed women to beincapable of original scientific work (a debate revisited, in only slightlydifferent terms, in 200536

) Women’s function in the world of science waswhat Baym calls an “affiliative” one, in which women disseminated andpopularized knowledge created by men Women eagerly studied science,taught science, and wrote science textbooks in nineteenth-centuryAmerica, but their specific model of science was one in which mencreated knowledge and women channeled it from the real experts to thepopulace, including lower-school students who studied the textbookswritten by women such as Almira Phelps.37

And while scientific careers,including careers in the academy, tentatively opened to women after 1870,the professional contours of scientific labor by the end of the century werestill divided along gender lines.38

In the last decades of the century, maleprofessional establishments closed ranks against women’s tentative entryinto many venues of American public life, both in and out of the acad-emy Academic and other professions in this era routinely blockedwomen from claiming the status of expert readily available to their malepeers, although individual women continued strenuously to fight thesebarriers.39

These conditions rendered it crucial that, in their bid for status inhigher education, English and the other modern languages distinguishthemselves rigorously from lower-school and female connotations The

1884 meeting of the Modern Language Association (founded in 1883)exemplifies the urgency of this agenda H.C.G Brandt, an associate inGerman at Hopkins and, later, professor of German at Hamilton Col-lege, argued that the scientific methods of philology gave the profession ofmodern languages “weight and dignity.” He complained that modernlanguage pedagogy was “justly accused of being too loose and easy,unscientific, and unsystematic Strict methods, and a scientific ground-work, require teachers specially and scientifically trained for their pro-fession.”40

Brandt’s rhetoric revealingly shows the association between theflimsy reputation of modern languages as anti-professional and theircultural femininity: “Modern Languages have not yet had a full oppor-tunity to show their value as disciplinary studies in courses similar to theclassical courses in point of time and severity of work They have beentreated as accomplishments like dancing and music,” he laments Brandt

goes on to propose a catalogue of appropriately severe “difficulties,”

“laws,” “drills,” and “masterpieces” with which to obliterate the image ofmodern languages as subjects for girls.41

In 1887, James Bright, thepowerful Hopkins philologist who had also taken his Ph.D there,described his ideal vision of the university in similarly masculine terms, as

a place “where men of liberal training may hear from the lips of a masterauthoritative utterances … on every branch of human knowledge.”42

Themasculinist ideology of science to which Brandt and Bright appealed wasunderwritten by a long tradition Evelyn Fox Keller points out thatFrancis Bacon provided a rhetoric of masculine domination throughwhich generations of scientists conceived of their enterprise His centralmetaphor described science as a force virile enough to penetrate andsubdue nature, seeking dominion over rather than commingling with thefemale principle.43

Philology as a method for the professional validation

of English was thus strategically brilliant: it claimed the cultural prestigeand professional authority of science and simultaneously dispelled thehaunting aura of the feminine that clung to the subject

Philologists such as Bright found an excellent environment at Hopkins

As a distinguished scientific institution, it both enhanced their studieswith the kind of prestige they desired for their work and fostered theirconception of themselves as scientists among scientists Beginning in

1880, for example, Hopkins produced the American Journal of Philology,and the University Circulars regularly reported on its research under theheading “Synopses of the Recent Scientific Journals.”44

When in 1905Bright was offered the newly endowed Caroline Donovan Chair ofEnglish Literature, he hesitated to take it because he did not approve ofthe chair’s literary connotations He accepted with the understanding that

he would continue to train young scientists rather than literary artists.45This ideology of scientific literary study persisted at Hopkins in 1926,when philologist Malone wrote,

Literature is indeed not in any proper sense a science (or branch of learning) It is rather the material with which the science of philology deals, much as the vegetable kingdom is the material with which the science of botany deals, and at bottom it is as absurd to speak of a professor of literature as it would be to speak

of a professor of vegetables 46

English negotiated its place in the university by appropriating science,its professional authority, and its masculine intellectual expertise It wonits upward curricular battle American literature would wage its ownbattle for professional legitimation against these newly reigning practi-tioners of English

a m e r i c a n l i t e r a t u r e e m e r g e sAmerican literature scholars in the early decades of the twentieth centurywidely cite the disparagement of American literature in English depart-ments These reports were structural repetitions of Hunt’s laments in 1884about the status of English with respect to classics, and about the “per-sistent opposition” by classics professors to the whole idea of English as

an advanced subject Jones reported in 1936 that scholars of Americanliterature were still “struggling with a well-nigh insoluble problem – aproblem created by the attitude of professors of English literature andexpressed in the policies of English departments and of organized scho-larship in this country.”47

Typical English department hostility includedresistance to making teaching appointments in American literature, tooffering courses in the subject (especially at the advanced undergraduateand graduate levels), and to incorporating or otherwise leaving room for

it in requirements for the undergraduate and graduate programs Jonescharacterized the standard English department attitude as one holdingthat American literature “has no Shakespeare, and therefore Americanliterature is scarcely worth studying.” According to Jones, “This is a gooddeal like arguing that football is not worth playing because Samson didn’tplay it.”48

Although philology had been a strategic tool for professionalizingEnglish, American literature was construed to be too recent and toothin a body of texts to lend itself to “scientific” philological investigation.Philology need not concern itself only with historically remote eras; thefact that American literature was construed as inadmissibly recent andthin was an ideological phenomenon, not a necessary one In his MLAaddress in 1887, “American Literature in the Class-room,” Albert H.Smyth (a secondary schoolteacher with an honorary B.A from Hopkins

in 1886) asked, “Is it because its language offers no peculiar attraction tothe grammarian that certain learned and successful masters of Englishpronounce the subject to be ‘so unsatisfactory?’” As an anti-philologicalform of literature, American literature did not pose the kinds of “diffi-cult” problems valued in the English profession, and was thus an implicitchallenge to the scientific foundations of professionalization on whichEnglish had built its prestige According to Smyth, however, “Americanliterature may be therefore highly serviceable in education because itadmits of a complete severance of literature from philology.” Tacticallyspeaking, this was not the argument to win the day The discussion thatfollowed Smyth’s talk was preoccupied with the level at which American

literature should be taught Bright responded that Smyth had “clearlymarked the distinction between the various classes in which Americanliterature could be studied, and the corresponding differences of aim andmethod in that instruction.” Professor A.H Tolman of Ripon Collegecommented, “In the high-school and in the academy American literaturehas an important place … In the intermediate class-room, in the collegeclass-room, which is where I teach,–into my class-room, Americanliterature has not entered.”49

More than fifty years later, John T Flanagan,assistant professor of English at the University of Minnesota in 1939 ,cited as an obstacle to American literature in the academy “the latentprejudice against native letters that still lingers in college faculties This isespecially true in schools where the philological tradition has beenstrong.”50

Hopkins was the consummate scientific institution for English ogists and it aggressively defined American literature as an inferiorknowledge product A quick summary of the larger national picture willhelp to contextualize local programmatic decisions at Hopkins as part of abroader curricular contest When Hopkins was founded in 1876 , Americanliterature had begun to receive minimal attention in American colleges Inthe 1880s, a few colleges began to offer it as an independent course, amongthem, in the East, Dartmouth (1880), Smith (1880), Wellesley ( 1886), andMount Holyoke (1887 ), and, farther west, Wisconsin, Nebraska, andIndiana (1882), Notre Dame (1887 ), and Iowa (1888).51

philol-In graduate studies,thirteen universities offered American literature in the 1890s The firstgraduate class might have been the one taught at the University of Virginia

in 1891 – 92.52

As this list indicates, American literature gained many of its strongestacademic footholds outside eastern male universities Women’s collegesand western colleges offered early curricular space compared with tradi-tional elite eastern male institutions such as Harvard, Yale, Columbia,Princeton, the University of Pennsylvania, and Hopkins.53

Just as Englishand the modern languages had taken earlier root in non-elite, non-east-ern, and girls’ schools, American literature tended to appear earliestoutside elite male establishments.54

Institutional elitism in the post-CivilWar era commonly operated not only via gender but also via region, asChapter 4 will explore more fully From the eastern vantage, “western”institutions, which still included what we now call the Midwest, wereconsidered remote from anywhere, much less civilization (to borrow EzraPound’s regional witticism) More objectively, it was the case that westerninstitutions were typically newly established and poorly staffed, often with

minimal student populations comprised of mostly unprepared students.55The fact that American literature made the curriculum at such schoolssuggested that the subject was readily taught by badly prepared teachersand easily accessible to badly prepared students, which contributed to itsimage as inferior at the more prestigious schools of the east In thementality of late-nineteenth-century education, meanwhile, Greek sig-nified a subject in which such concessions to ill-preparedness simplycould not be made It was the consummate subject of consummate dif-ficulty American literature, on the other hand, signified a subject thatcould flesh out course offerings in a curricular pinch with any teacher youcould rustle off the street.

By this point, American literature was also commonly taught in thesecondary schools, where it had been acquiring curricular space since the

1850s.56

As had been the case with English, these lower-school associationsexacerbated the subject’s inferior image Influential Boston author andeditor Horace Scudder, also a prominent educational theorist with aspecial interest in the place of literature in primary and secondary schools,took a special interest in American literature and vigorously championedits role in lower-school curricula At Houghton, Mifflin & Company, amajor textbook publisher of American literature for lower schools, heworked on such projects as the Riverside Literature Series Begun in 1882,the series made unabridged American classics available in cheap schooleditions, selling for fifteen cents apiece.57

When Scudder was invited tolecture before the National Education Association in July 1888, HenryOscar Houghton urged him to accept the invitation, stressing thatScudder would “have a great opportunity of preaching sound doctrine tothe entire country.” Of course, Houghton, Mifflin stood to make a greatdeal of sound cash from the appearance as well By the time of Scudder’saddress, the Riverside Literature Series included thirty-nine titles and hadsold 100,000 copies.58

Scudder’s speech extols the virtues of the men he considered the greatAmerican writers: Bryant, Emerson, Longfellow, Whittier, Holmes,Lowell, Hawthorne, Irving, and Cooper.59

While he argues passionatelyfor the inclusion of literature in the school curriculum, and specifically forthe inclusion of works by these American authors, he is careful to stipulatethat he construes American authors as appropriate material for lower-school children only “I am not arguing for the critical study of our greatauthors in the higher grades of our schools,” Scudder explained “They arenot the best subjects for critical scholarship; criticism demands greaterremoteness, greater foreignness of nature … I am arguing for the free,

generous use of these authors in the principal years of school life.”60Scudder marketed American literature as a knowledge product that wasbest – indeed, only – fit for lower schools.

Scudder’s address thus offered a cultural definition of American erature as a body of texts best suited to the work of elementary instruc-tion The importance of such a definition of American literature’sclassroom role, coming from such a figure as Scudder, cannot be over-stated, especially at a time when the stratifications of the levels of theschool system and their relationships to one another was an increasinglypressing issue among American educators Literature textbooks were acrucial factor in curricular development, often driving what transpired

lit-in classrooms As Scudder himself polit-ints out lit-in his address, “It would

be hard to compute the literary force which has found a field for exercise

in the construction of school textbooks in America.”61

Indeed, theRiverside Literature Series promulgated and installed as a lower cur-riculum such works as Longfellow’s “Evangeline” and “The Courtship ofMiles Standish,” Whittier’s “Snow-Bound,” Benjamin Franklin’s Auto-biography, Lowell’s “Vision of Sir Launfal,” Emerson’s essays, and Irving’sThe Sketch Book It successfully marketed a particular American canon asone suited specifically to the lower-school textbook market One powerfulmarker of the canonical force of this market is the fact that, whenAmerican literature first appeared on college entrance exams, it did so byway of exactly these texts They had trickled up from the Riverside seriesand like textbooks, as well as from the lower curricula that those bookshelped to shape Between 1906 and 1911, for example, the required textsfor the entrance exams to Smith College included “The Vision of SirLaunfal,” Franklin’s Autobiography, The Sketch Book, “The Courtship ofMiles Standish,” Emerson’s essays, and other texts from the Riversidecanon.62

It was the lower-school American canon that became the earliesthigher-school canon

This affiliation between American literature and lower levels ofschooling hampered the professionalization of the field It would need tofind its own trickle-up pathways into college curricula, as indeed Englishhad done via philology Its early and often tentative entries into thecurriculum were usually not a function of institutional support or pro-grammatic decisions; typically, a lone scholar with an interest in thesubject would begin to offer classes and the subject would develop amarginal curricular place Jones characterized the typical teacher whocovered American literature in its early decades as often “a minority ofone among a faculty of fifteen or twenty.”63

Whether the institutional